There is not enough petrol in the world for everybody now, and each year there is less, so what are we going to do when it finishes? Perhaps we will go back to horses and carriages and bicycles.

In the Second World War, some people did not use petrol in their cars. They made gas from wood and plants instead, and then they put it in big bags on top of their cars. The cars did not go fast, but it was better than nothing. But we cannot cut down all our trees to make gas; we need them for other things too.

Besides gas, we can also use electricity for our cars, but first we must make the electricity! Some countries have coal, and they make electricity with that, but we will not always have coal. Other countries have big, strong rivers, and these turn turbines and make electricity more easily and cheaply.

We are also able to get power from the tides. We put turbines in the mouth of a river. Then, when the tide comes up, it turns the turbines, and when it runs back towards the sea, it turns them again. And we know that the waves of the sea can also turn turbines when they go up and down.

Derek was a little boy. He lived with his parents in a small house in a town. They did not have a big garden. Derek liked animals very much. One day he said to his father, “I've got a little money, Daddy. Can I buy a pony, please?” But his father answered, “No, Derek, we can't have a pony in the garden, because it's too small and we haven't got a field. People who keep ponies in small gardens without a field are unkind. Ponies need a lot of space.” Derek did not want to be unkind to a pony, so he did not ask his father again.
But then his father got a job in another place, and he and his family left their small house in the town and went and lived in a bigger house in the country. It had a nice garden and a field, and Derek was very happy. There was a farm near their new house, and there were horses, cows and a few sheep there. Derek went to see them every day. He was five years old now, and he began to think of a pony again. “My birthday is next month,” he thought. “Perhaps Daddy will buy me a pony then.” After a little time, he began to talk about ponies to his parents again. Then his birthday came. His parents gave him a few nice presents — but there was no pony. Derek was sad. But then suddenly his Uncle Tom arrived. He was a farmer — and he had a big pony with him. “Hello, Derek,” Uncle Tom said, “Happy birthday. This is your birthday present from me and Aunt Mary.” Derek was a little afraid, because the pony was very big. He looked at it for a few minutes and then he said to his uncle, “Is he for me, or am I for him?”

Mr Anderson lives in a big city in America, and last year he came to England to visit the small town which his father had come from.
There was a big, square garden in this town, and one day, while Mr Anderson was walking past, he stopped outside it and looked in. There was beautiful grass in the middle of the garden. It was green and short and soft.
A gardener was watering it, and Mr Anderson said to him, “Good morning. Is this your garden?”
“No,” answered the gardener, “it isn't mine, but I work here.”
“How do people get such beautiful lawns?” Mr Anderson asked. “Ours are never as good as this.”
The gardener stopped his work and looked at Mr Anderson. Then he said, “You come from America, don't you?”
Mr Anderson answered, “Yes, but my father came from this town.”
“Well,” the gardener said, “it's easy to grow lawns like this.” He asked Mr Anderson to come in, and said, “Let me tell you about it.”
Mr Anderson went into the garden. “My name's Anderson,” he said to the gardener, “Joe Anderson. What's yours?”
“My name's Gray,” the gardener answered, “Pete Gray. Now about the lawns. First we sow our seeds; then when the grass appears, we pull all the weeds out; after that, we cut the grass every week, we water it every day when the weather is very dry during the summer season, and we sometimes roll it.”
“Oh,” Mr Anderson answered, “that's very interesting, Pete. And how long does it take before the lawn becomes like this?”
The gardener thought for a few moments and then answered, “Oh, about four hundred years.”

Joan's mother loved her very much, so she was not happy when she married an army officer when she was twenty-one years old and went to live in another country with her husband.
“When am I going to see Joan again?” she thought. “And how is she going to live abroad among strangers without her mother near her?”
Joan wrote to her parents every Sunday, and then a year later, she had a baby. It was a girl, and she and her husband gave it the name Kate and thought that she was the cleverest and most beautiful child in the world.
After that, Joan's parents received plenty of letters and postcards every week about Kate and all the wonderful things she had done. There were also lots of colour photographs of the baby, but there was never any news about Joan herself.
Joan's mother knew that parents always thought that their own children were special, and better than any others, and she also knew that they photographed them all the time, so she did not find all this news about Kate and all the photographs of her very interesting. She wished that Joan's letters had more news about herself “and what she was doing in them. When she replied to Joan's letters, she always asked about her. She wrote two or three times: “Are you tired after the baby? Are you resting enough? Is Fred (he was Joan's husband) helping you? Does anyone come in to clean your house for you? When are you going to come home? Do you need anything? Does the baby keep you awake at night?” and other things like that. But Joan's replies were always about Kate, and there was never any news about herself.
In the end Joan's mother was rather angry, so she wrote to Joan that she was very glad that Joan had a very clever child, because she herself had never had one.